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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'A crash in my favour',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/04/21.jpg" alt="Construction" class="framed-centred-image" width="800" height="480"/>
<section id="religion">
	<h2>Religion</h2>
	<p>
		Before church began, there was a child in the chapel wanting to play.
		An elderly person wouldn&apos;t let them, which was making them upset, and they were throwing a bit of a fit.
		&quot;Today is not a day to play.&quot;
		The child kept whining about how they wanted to play.
		&quot;Today is the lord&apos;s day.&quot;
		Um.
		Okay.
		So does that mean no playing on Sunday?
		Ever?
		Or is that specifically no playing on Easter?
		I don&apos;t think what day it is is the problem.
		It&apos;s that they&apos;re at church right now.
		They should probably wait until they get home to play, but they shouldn&apos;t have to wait until tomorrow.
	</p>
	<p>
		During the sacrament prayer, the priests must have made a mistake, as they said the prayer again.
		I missed the difference, but I don&apos;t have the prayer memorised or anything.
		But then, they messed up a second time.
		This time, I actually heard it, as they not only paused, but repeated a line!
		I thought for sure that they were going to try a third time, but they didn&apos;t.
		I guess pauses and repeats don&apos;t count as mess-ups to them?
	</p>
	<p>
		There were three different speakers today, the first two having something of interest to say.
		The first told us that all sin, including thoughts and desires, will washed away in heaven.
		Wow.
		There we go with the thought crimes again.
		Additionally, there&apos;s the fact that if our minds are magically altered, for example to change our thoughts and desires, we won&apos;t be us any more.
		Our thoughts make us who we are.
		For that to be taken away, would be for us to be destroyed and someone else created in our place from our remains.
		Scary.
		A god that&apos;d want that is not a god that deserves our warship.
		They then continued that we need to repent every day.
		Repenting occasionally isn&apos;t good enough.
		We should make a daily habit of it.
		Wow.
		If we&apos;re so terrible that we need to apologise to our gods every day for it, what was even the point in creating us this way?
	</p>
	<p>
		The next speaker told us that Jesus won&apos;t fix our problems or take away our trials.
		He&apos;ll only comfort us in our times of stress.
		Okay.
		That&apos;s not helpful.
		As I&apos;ve said before, that&apos;s counter-productive at worst and useless at best.
		It also puts Jesus in the business of bandages instead of cures, which is exactly what the missionaries said isn&apos;t the case.
	</p>
	<p>
		Today, instead of segregating people by sex or gender as usual, the church had adult-oriented instructors go to a meeting.
		The normal primary lessons were still in effect, but I guess everyone else went home?
		That doesn&apos;t make sense though, as they wouldn&apos;t leave their children.
		Come to think of it, I really don&apos;t know what was going on.
		I should have sat in on the instructors&apos; meeting if I could, but I didn&apos;t really think of it.
		So I went to primary again.
	</p>
	<p>
		There, the children were taught that Easter eggs represent new life, and that you have a new life every time you repent.
		Um.
		What?
		I don&apos;t think that&apos;s how it works.
		I won&apos;t argue symbology, but I don&apos;t think you&apos;re a new person each time you repent.
		And if you are, there&apos;s a bigger problem.
		If you have a new life each time you repent, you have a new death too.
		The old you, the one that repented, is gone.
		The teacher then ran a game, where the children found plastic eggs, most of which were empty.
		The few with contents contained scripture verses, which were tangentially related to verses in a song, and the children then sang the song while learning sign language for some, but not all, of the words.
	</p>
	<p>
		After the main group class, when the children split up by age, I tried to sit in with the second-youngest group, as I sat in with the youngest group last time.
		I was told by the teacher of that group to sit in with one of the older groups instead.
		I don&apos;t know what the deal was.
	</p>
	<p>
		So anyway, I moved to the next class up.
		This one was discussing why they celebrate Easter.
		One child asked &quot;Why do we celebrate Halloween?&quot;.
		That was amusing.
		The teacher responded that they weren&apos;t sure why Halloween is celebrated, but that today, they were discussing Easter.
		To explain Easter, the teacher explained Holy Week, which is apparently the week just prior to Easter, plus Easter itself.
		To be clear, that means Holy Week is eight days long.
	</p>
	<p>
		First is Palm Sunday.
		Apparently according to the religion, the original Palm Sunday happened when Jesus entered the city of Jerusalem.
		People placed palm leaves on the ground for him to walk on as he entered the city, a treatment typically reserved for royalty.
		He was their saviour, lord, and king though, so they treated him with the utmost respect.
		On Monday, Jesus &quot;cleansed&quot; the temple by throwing out all the salespeople.
		You can&apos;t have business intruding on religion, y&apos;know?
		He also healed the sick in the temple that day.
		Cleanse the temple of salespeople, then cleanse the bodies of afflictions.
		The two seem sort of themed, tying the day&apos;s activities together nicely.
		On Tuesday and Wednesday, Jesus taught the gospel within the city.
		On Thursday, which was the first passover, he held the first sacrament meeting, and went to Gethsemane to suffer on behalf of all humankind.
		On Friday, he went on trial, was executed, then was buried.
		On Saturday, his lifeless body rested in a tomb, but his spirit was still busy.
		He taught the dead in the spirit world the gospel and ministered to them.
		And on Sunday, he was resurrected, and told Mary to tell his brother that he was back.
		When he told her, he was accompanied by angels.
		She actually saw the angels first, and then Jesus came up to her in the dark.
		Jesus had a really busy week!
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;m seeing two major issues here though.
		The first I noticed was that it seems word of Jesus&apos; return was coming only through Mary.
		I haven&apos;t read the story of Jesus myself yet, so I don&apos;t have the details I need yet to be sure of this.
		However, if Mary was the only one to see Jesus once he was back, the entire story could have easily been fabricated by her in an effort to make her son appear to be what he&apos;d said he was.
		That, of course, assumes that Jesus was an actual historical figure, which is still being debated.
		I think the current consensus is that there was no single Jesus, but that the biblical Jesus is actually an amalgam of people from other stories, some of which were truth and some of which were fiction.
		But anyway, having a single source of information, especially supernatural information, really calls the validity of said information into question.
		Secondly, people say Jesus was dead for three days, but look at the time frame.
		He was dead for two day.
		Two and a half, tops.
		The scriptures are already a great stretch, but it looks like people are stretching them further.
	</p>
	<p>
		After the lesson, the teacher and their spouse, who&apos;d been in the room with us sort of helping as needed, had the children do a colouring and cutting exercise to try to drill the lesson in.
		It was the sort of thing you don&apos;t directly learn much from, but keeps your mind tangentially on the topic at hand, which probably causes children to absorb it a bit better than if the activity wasn&apos;t included.
	</p>
	<p>
		I think I&apos;ve had enough of trying to see how the indoctrination of the children happens.
		I get the idea.
		It seems to mostly be done in the main class, where the children of all ages are, and it&apos;s mostly done through song.
		I don&apos;t think I&apos;ll visit each of the separate smaller classes after all.
		I do think I&apos;m learning quite a bit about the religion itself from the separate classes, but I&apos;ve heard that they&apos;re the church is now trying to keep these lessons in sync with one another, which I guess they weren&apos;t doing, previously.
		That means I can see the same topic covered, no matter which class I visit.
		So I think I&apos;ll just sit in with the class with the oldest children from now on.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="funds">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		I decided to take a detour and hit up the grocery store after church.
		By getting to the store before work, in addition to after, I could make a purchase twice, and thus attempt to get more money out of my bottle-redemption account quicker.
		So, I tried to withdraw almost ten dollars more than a sack of potatoes costs, figuring that if they didn&apos;t want to give me change this time, I&apos;d add six loaves of bread to the purchase, and stick the bread in my freezer.
		Instead, though the funds were withdrawn from the account, Windows crashed again, preventing the credit voucher from being printed out.
		I swear to Squiddy, I absolutely hate Windows.
		There&apos;s a reason I&apos;ve never used it as the operating system on any of my machines, even as a child, back before I learned about the importance of free software.
		Windows just can&apos;t function.
	</p>
	<p>
		This time, I&apos;d come <strong>*before*</strong> work though, meaning that the bottle-redemption centre was still open.
		I&apos;d been told the first time to come back within their hours and customer service would telephone the redemption centre to get the issue resolved on my behalf, so this time, I waited in line at the customer service desk to see what could be done about it.
		When my tern came, the service representative telephoned the redemption centre, and some glitch or something cut off the call.
		So they tried again.
		But more people had gotten in line behind me, and they customer service representative didn&apos;t want them to wait longer than they had to.
		However, they didn&apos;t even try to pass off the telephone call onto me, even though I was the one affected by the Windows crash.
		They had far too good of customer service etiquette for that.
		The bottle-redemption centre still hadn&apos;t answered, so they hung up and just gave me cash, so they could get to the next customer.
		And they even threw in an extra dollar.
		Nice!
		I mean, it was only a dollar, but I&apos;m really strapped for cash at the moment, and they didn&apos;t have to give me extra money at all.
		I would have been more than happy just to take the face value of the voucher in cash or even in in-store credit.
		This dollar might make or break my attempts to avoid dipping into my savings account this month though, and I really appreciate it.
	</p>
	<p>
		So that meant I got the cash, which was cool, but also meant I wasn&apos;t able to test to see whether I could use the oversight in the system to get my funds out of the account in cash form.
		That meant I didn&apos;t know if going back after work would let me get more out.
		However, if nothing else, I&apos;d need to go back anyway to try again to perform my little experiment.
		After work though, the machine was out of order.
		I&apos;ll have to wait until another time.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Like you said, people don&apos;t get rolled back when we die.
			We cease to exist, but that happens on both sides of your diagram anyway.
			A transaction will end, even if it reaches the committed state, and humans will die even if we reach our destination, though maybe not right away.
		</p>
		<p>
			I would like to make one amendment to your flow chart though.
			From the partly-committed state, it&apos;s still possible to failed to commit, and end up in the failed state, followed by the aborted state.
			Likewise, your diagram shows continuing to ride as always resulting in reaching the destination, but continuing to ride can also lead to accident just like the initial part of the ride can.
			So likewise, an alternative path from continuing to ride should lead to accident in the diagram of the analogy.
		</p>
		<p>
			Your drawing reminds me of an image I&apos;ve seen in which π, a real but irrational number tells i to get real, while i, a rational but imaginary number, tells π to be rational.
			Drawings of numbers having conversations like yours amuse me.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		I feel like I&apos;m behind again this week, though once I get to my day off, which is the day the work is due, I&apos;ll get it done quickly enough.
		I&apos;d just hoped to have a lot more done before then.
		Things aren&apos;t working out in my favour in that regard though.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="prayer">
	<h2>Prayer impressions log</h2>
	<p>
		Before reading the second chapter of Genesis, I prayed that I was about to start said chapter, and that it&apos;d be entertaining if the second chapter is as amusing as the first.
		But also, that if it was, it&apos;d likely be further evidence that the gods I&apos;m praying to for this little exercise don&apos;t exist.
		In response, all I saw in my head was pizzas.
	</p>
	<p>
		In tonight&apos;s chapter, Yahweh lies to Adam, even though lying is a sin, Yahweh doesn&apos;t sin, and Yahweh specifically doesn&apos;t lie.
		So I prayed about this, and how we don&apos;t have a way to trust a god that claims not to lie, but then goes and lies.
		In response, I saw burnt pizzas and clothes pins in my mind.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
